N.m. Law Protects Pregnant Women

New Mexico has enacted what one legal authority described as the first law in the nation designed for the protection of pregnant women.

California, Georgia and Mississippi have statutes calling for the protection of fetuses against some criminal acts, but the New Mexico law differs in that it is designed to protect the pregnant woman.

The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Toney Anaya on April 5, makes it a felony punishable by up to four years in prison to injure a pregnant woman in a way that causes her to lose her unborn child.

The new law stipulates that the injury must have occurred in the commission of another crime such as rape, assault or driving while drunk and that it does not affect legal voluntary abortion.

``This is the first legislation like this I have seen,`` said Janet Gallagher, a leading authority on laws and court decisions affecting American women. Gallagher is the director of the civil liberties and public policy program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

Gallagher said she considered the statute to be a ``very sane and workable approach in an intensely emotional area,`` and said the bill provided pregnant women with special protection in much the same way that many states have special legal protections for police officers, prison guards or witnesses for the state in courtroom proceedings.

Laws in other states that were designed to protect fetuses have sometimes been used against mothers, Gallagher said. She cited one case in which a woman was sued by the father of her child because she took a drug while she was pregnant that caused discoloration of her baby`s teeth.

The bill was introduced in the New Mexico Legislature on the heels of three traffic accidents in the state involving intoxicated drivers in which three pregnant women, two of whom were killed, lost their unborn children.

According to State Sen. Al Otero, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, the final legislation was a result of long sessions with anti-abortion and abortion rights groups. An effort to pass a similar bill in 1983 was derailed by arguments over whether the legislation could be used in an attempt to prevent abortions.

``We wanted to remove it from the abortion context altogether,`` Otero said. ``We therefore took the position that the focus should be the woman and that the child should be considered her valuable property.``

A spokesman for an anti-abortion organization said the group had supported the bill even though it believed the protections should have been given to the fetus.

``We support legislation promoting the notion that the fetus is a separate legal entity and that its death in circumstances like these should be equated with murder,`` said Dauneen Dolce, administrative assistant for Right to Life New Mexico. ``We didn`t get that with this bill, but we felt that if we lobbied to change the bill`s focus to the fetus, there was a possibility the bill might be defeated just because of our involvement.``

Otero said that once the two groups agreed on language for the bill, it passed in the House 58-2 and in the Senate 22-12.

Sen. John Budagher, a Republican who voted against the proposal, said wryly that it was hard to take a stand that could be viewed as opposing protection for pregnant women. ``I`m not against the issue,`` he said, ``but I was and I am against the law.``